Our cash name of game

I'M SUFFICIENTLY au fait with my weaknesses to know I ought to avoid computer games. I've had lapses that verged on obsession; Doom about a decade ago, then World of Warcraft - thanks to a newspaper assignment that got out of hand - and, more recently, Word Solitaire Aurora for the iPhone.
But while playing them, I felt, however misguidedly, that I was undergoing some process of self-improvement. Doom enhanced my talent for blasting monsters into the ether. Warcraft bonded me with fellow players in collective pursuit of some amulet or other. Word Solitaire transformed me into an anagram ninja.
I don't regret spending time playing them. But a newish breed of social media game is being criticised within the gaming industry for requiring no skill and featuring repetitive, tedious and shallow tasks - the gaming equivalent of dish-washing. Nevertheless, these games cleverly keep people playing and, crucially, spending money.
Perhaps the best example is the Facebook-hosted game, Farmville. This game has inspired millions to spend far more time on Facebook than they would have done; about 10 per cent of the site's membership plays it. That's well over 50 million people who have been persuaded - usually by their Facebook friends - that it would be a great idea to spend a lot of time cultivating imaginary crops.
Farmville's maker, Zynga, with competitors such as Playfish, has perfected this gaming model that requires limited talent but maximum dedication, while also being supremely addictive. And while it costs people nothing to play initially, true devotees can enhance their experience by paying hard cash - often to speed up gameplay. (Impatience is one of the human frailties these games do their best to exploit.)
The model is spreading to phones. Smurfs' Village has been in the news for featuring heavily in several players' credit-card bills, joining games such as Petville and Mafia Wars that appear in headlines such as: "Teenager spends family Christmas money on stuff that doesn't exist."
These games are the 21st-century slot machine: optimised to get us to shove as much money in as possible for a reward that will probably be fleeting and insubstantial. Obviously, we're not all predisposed to slot-machine addiction, but the statistic that 90 per cent of revenue from these games tends to come from 10 per cent of its players is worrying, and one gaming companies should probably be morally obliged to monitor.
Of course, we spend our money on all kinds of junk; who's to say that downloading a Michael McIntyre series from iTunes will give any greater pleasure to its recipient than if they bought a toolshed in Farmville? But some in the industry worry that if compelling games are replaced by purely addictive, money-generating timewasters, we'll become alienated from the medium as a whole. Especially when we realise we've become little more than rats in a plastic box, repeatedly hitting a lever in return for a pellet.
A story has surfaced about an online spectacles vendor in New York who bullishly claims he's found the perfect way to promote his business on the web: offer appalling customer service. When confronted, watchdog-style, about his scamming of customers, he replied he'd never had it so good. Because when people complain about his company online and link to his website, it ascends Google's page ranking for any searches for certain brands of spectacles. And the more popular the site that people use to complain, the greater the kudos Google bestows.
You see the same thing in the political blogosphere; irate left-wingers urge each other to follow links to a right-wing blog they find outrageous, ensuring said blog becomes even more prominent. Because until search engines are able to discern between a link of complaint and a link of praise, all links equal popularity.
So beware when buying this Christmas; don't blindly use a search engine - they're brilliant pieces of engineering but don't know everything.Independent